1y ago

Hyprland is a toxic community

drewdevault.com Hyprland is a toxic community

Hyprland is an open source Wayland compositor based on wlroots, a project I started back in 2017 to make it easier to build good Wayland compositors. It’s a project which is loved by its users for its emphasis on customization and “eye candy” – beautiful graphics and animations, each configuration tailored to the unique look and feel imagined by the user who creates it. It’s a very exciting project!

Unfortunately, the effect is spoilt by an incredibly toxic and hateful community. I cannot recommend Hyprland to anyone who is not prepared to steer well clear of its community spaces. Imagine a high school boys' locker room come to life on Discord and GitHub and you’ll get an idea of what it’s like.

I empathise with Vaxry. I remember being young, smart, productive… and mean. I did some cool stuff, but I deeply regret the way I treated people. It wasn’t really my fault – I was a product of my environment – but it was my responsibility. Today, I’m proud to have built many welcoming communities, where people are rewarded for their involvement, rather than coming away from their experience hurt. What motivates us to build and give away free software if not bringing joy to ourselves and others? Can we be proud of a community which brings more suffering into the world?

Update: Response from Vaxry, Hyprland Developer

Linux @discuss.tchncs.de

Hyprland is a toxic community

drewdevault.com /2023/09/17/Hyprland-toxicity.html

27 7

124 comments

As someone on HackerNews said:
I've never felt the need for any "community" for my window manager of choice
- Hmmm. If abuse happens, is the right idea to say that “I don’t need this community”?
  I’m not sure how that HackerNews comment helps in the slightest. If my university has an obscure basket weaving community and people are getting abused in that community, should I just say “Eh we don’t actually need a basket weaving community”.
  It’s also amusing to me that a commenter on a relatively obscure and niche website is complaining that that don’t need (or care about abuse that transpired on) a niche community from another website. And then this comment is echoed in yet another niche community.
  
  "You shouldn't use this window manager because their community is toxic"
  "I'm not going to interact with the community"
  Seems fair enough
  
  I just wanted to point out that it's ridiculous to form some kind religion¹ around a wayland compositor.
  Also, I don't want anybody to think I'm supporting what's happening there. I just don't really care about Hyprland's community because I'm not part of it.
  ¹Hyprland's discord server is named "Church of Hyprland"
- Hmm, I feel like there's some nuances around Hyprland (and it's kind of window managers) that makes having a place for discussion valuable.
  Plugin development discussions
  Configuration recipes and troubleshooting (Configs for tiling wm's often are like 500-line software projects)
  ...and sometimes its just fun to chat with like-minded people who share a similar philosophy on the tools they use on their computers
  I'm not a hyprland user, but I find it valuable to lurk around SwayWM communities on Discord and Reddit.
- Yeah.
  At maximum a bug/issue tracker is needed.
- That's great for you but that might not be true for someone you recommend it to, or decides to give it a try after you mention you use it. Someone might go looking for help or tips there.
  
  File a bug, read FAQ, StackOverflow? If you are messing around with window managers on Linux, a certain level of competency is expected. However, I'm more concerned about the weirdos hanging around in a discord chat of said window manager, harassing strangers. Such a strange hobby.

[A trans person] joined the Discord server and made a big deal out of their pronouns [..] because they put their pronouns in their nickname and made a big deal out of them because people were referring to them as “he” [misgendering them], which, on the Internet, let’s be real, is the default.
Damn I didn't know women didn't exist on the internet! Also "making a big deal out of ones pronouns" is almost never the case, it's always just a normal request for the respect of addressing someone properly.
- Unclear if you're referring to the meme or if serious, so I'm gonna leave this here just in case: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/there-are-no-girls-on-the-internet
  
  given I am a woman who is currently on the internet, I am aware there are women on the internet.
  thanks for explaining that for me 😉
- Does drew not know about the existence of singular they? I use that unless i know their gender properly
  
  These are not Drew's words, he is quoting something said by the project dev. The context that the previous commenter ommitted is:
  Following my email conversation with Vaxry, he appeared on a podcast to discuss toxicity in the Hyprland community. This quote from the interview clearly illustrates the attitude of the leadership:
  [A trans person] joined the Discord server and made a big deal out of their pronouns [..] because they put their pronouns in their nickname and made a big deal out of them because people were referring to them as “he” [misgendering them], which, on the Internet, let’s be real, is the default. And so, one of the moderators changed the pronouns in their nickname to “who/cares”. […] Let’s be real, this isn’t like, calling someone the N-word or something.
  
  I use y’all also, it’s can be singular or plural in practice

the moderators of the Discord server engaged in a harassment campaign against a transgender user, including using their moderator privileges to edit the pronouns in their username from “they/she” to “who/cares”
Well, apparently those moderators care. Why else edit it?
- They like to make a show like everyone on Earth is just like they are so how dare we exist differently but it's clearly just them being hateful. Idunno how bigots manage to still think they're clever and totally not insecure whilst making self-contradictory statements and raging over nonsense and trivia for hours at a time, often in spaces where they're not even welcome.

I can personally vouch for how toxic the Discord server and its moderators/admins are. Went there for support (Hyprland was crashing on startup on AMD, sway worked fine), and was told something along the lines of "if you can't figure this out you're stupid and you should stop using Linux". Figured out the issue on my own and stopped using and recommending Hyprland after that.
- Vaxry's themselves does this all the time. He's an asshole. Like I get OSS developers don't owe anyone anything, but some people think that means they can be an asshole to their users for no reason too.
  Just look at this for example. Someone asked a clarifying question and Vaxry basically said "stop making noise". Ironically producing more noise instead of just, idk, answering them? https://github.com/hyprwm/Hyprland/issues/1817
  
  Sorry to be dragging a comment out of the aether as I read into Hyprland controversies, but its absolutely wild this guy was rude across the span of an entire week about a pretty typical issue request, and then later down the road was like "it was one bad comment I might have been having a bad day" and its like... Dude it was 7 days
- I empathize a lot with this comment.
  In tech (though I would guess as in many other technical domains), many people do seem to easily bully people for not knowing things or making mistakes. I'm guessing it's just people having high insecurities themselves, it's even more of an ego thing when considering that computer things are considered as a "nerd" pastime (a group considering itself "smart"). Not knowing things - even things that we would have thought are really simple - should be OK on an help channel as long as you're not abusing the helpers' patience.
  I've been a witness of these situation countless times, the sane way of handling this for me have been to just consider that these are mostly people externalizing their poor self esteem and to just continue conversation (at worst with the other people) as normal.
- I wonder if this comes from the only help / discussion being on Discord which has an infamously horrible search feature.
  A forum could even be indexed by search engines so no need for:
  A discord account
  Annoying the developers with frequently asked questions

this guy just learned about discord general chats lol
they're all this bad, and also they're absolutely dogshit for open source software so I have no idea why people make them
- I'm in the max server limit, 100 right now, and many of those are people who treat discord as github, which is so annoying (but many projects are of questionable legality, like Dan's palace which makes and distributes completed android and vita ports of other games for free).
  One time I got excited since there was announcement for the half life 2 android source port discord. I thought it was a big update or maybe a new game, but what I saw was something like:
  the memes channel is for memes, not child porn
  It's just discord that has these issues. Matrix or IRC don't have these problems. Discord just creates a kind of culture that fosters this stuff.
  
  yeah it really attracts the young gamer crowd, not exactly for serious discussion
  
  Nope it's all over matrix as well.
- If your discord general chat looks like this you are in the wrong discord
  
  You frontin like there's any better quality chat then that

All this over some discord server drama. I cant blame the dev for wanting to code and not waste his time moderating.
- Then don't run a discord instance?
  "Hey, the server is getting pretty toxic and I can't be bothered moderating it - this is no longer an official communication channel, I'm not going to be hanging out here anymore, if you need help ask in the GitHub discussion forum"
- That douchebag can't even moderate himself. I wasn't considering trying out hyprland, but after this I wouldn't feel safe running his code on any of my computers. I can imagine that it would do some "prank" if it found out that I'm thinking differently
- It's the developer's responsibility to moderate the discord server properly.
  
  It's the moderation staff's responsibility. Sorry for nitpicking, I understand in this case it's likely the same people.
  I just get triggered when I hear that an open source software developer should have any responsibilities at all (maybe apart from some extreme examples), and I wouldn't like this idea to stick in anyone's head.
  
  The developer owes you nothing.
- "server"
  
  That's what they're called over there, yes.

The guy who develops hyprland is a known transphobe, I'm surprised this is just now coming out.
- That usually isn't a problem as long as they keep it to themselves and away from the community. There are many Foss developers who are like that - they don't cause a controversy. This one seems to be different and openly toxic.

I stopped using it because of a couple shitty interactions on Discord. I don't know anything about the developer himself but the company he keeps sucks. Using the word "cucked" when talking about breaks in dependencies... and being told "see if I care" when pointing out a race condition I found in initialization that caused problems with multimonitor setups.
No thanks. Sway works great. No need for eye candy.

Hyprland dev's response to blog post: https://blog.vaxry.net/articles/2023-hyprlandsCommunity
- What a tone-deaf response, yikes.
  
  Yeahhh, he's like "everything was taken out of context to smear me", he shows the context and it doesn't make him look any better.
  It's a shame bc I really wanted to get into hyprland, but I won't get involved with a project that is okay harassing people for being trans.
  
  His response is perfectly rational. You need to stop getting offended over every small thing on the internet.
- The final bit is interesting. Vaxry says Q (who was openly bigoted) got punished, but doesn't mention prisj (who was slightly less open about it).
  #general does indeed sometimes have jokes that some people might treat as "controversial".
  And if you really need a place with controversial jokes, split it off from your support server or something.

Your first mistake was joining a Discord group for a software product. Github pages / bug-tracker or GTFO.
- Fucking right? Let alone a open source project.

Just dont interact with the community. Theres an excelent wiki that details everything.

Who cares about the community? If it's useful and works I will use it. It's not like I'm paying for it. If the community is toxic people will not contribute to the project. If they don't need contributors they can do whatever they like.
- Because it's important to call people out for their bullshit and not tacitly approve of it by keeping quiet?
  
  IMHO calling people out for everything easily turns into vicious witch haunts and doesn't really change anything. They weren't nice to you? Don't use their software. The whole world really doesn't need to know about each alleged asshole. Not shouting at every person I disagree with is not approving of anything.
- If you use this software, You will likely come across the community, in at least a passive way. as this is a piece of software with extensive manual configuration. Most people will be reading blogs and forums to figure out their configuration.
- Rare to see people with common sense these days.

It sucks that cool projects like hyprland are usually riddled with toxic weirdos that ruin it. It also sucks that there's not much to choose in the wayland space that's usable and actively developed but I refuse to use hyprland after seeing this.

Well that's pretty bad. I just switched to hyprland and like it, but I don't want to give those people a bigger platform than what they already have... Ah shit I'll have to think about that. Why can't we have nice things that aren't made by complete assholes.

From Vaxry's response:
opinion - has no place in a serious blogpost
Sir, what do you think a BLOG is for?

CW: slurs, bigotry
Well this was apparently their chat log. I found the link through the comments on Hacker News. Whatever you think of Drew, he's not wrong at all, they sound like they just discovered 4chan.

I just switched to hyprland and although the discord general chat isn't for everyone, they have been helpful when I ask stupid questions and need a little help.

Wow, this looks awesome!
- Does not anymore

It wasn’t really my fault – I was a product of my environment
Riiight.
- You kinda left out the next line in which he says
  But it was my responsibility
  That’s the whole statement and tbh I agree. It’s never anyone’s fault for being a bad person, but it is 100% their responsibility to right their wrongs.
  
  I didn't kinda leave it out, I just left it out
- The very next words are "but it was my responsibility"... what exactly is bad about that statement if you don't intentionally cherry pick a bad quote?
  
  It was his fault too imo
- Yeah, I'm not too fond of that statement. I respect ddevault, particularly since I have seen his serious growth into a mature, empathetic person. So ICM surprised that this made it into the post.

Take every opinion from Drew DeVault with a grain of salt.

Sounds like a great excuse to fork the project and start its own community. Of course, keep integrating upstream fixes, but maybe make the logo a trans pride flag.
- Correction: sounds like a great reason for the users to move to a different project and abandon that codebase entirely

Mom, people on the internet are being mean again

This is a good enough reason to fork a project and establish a new community with new norms.
- I mean if he is the lead dev, then I doubt this makes much sense.
  
  Hyprland is itself a fork of wlroots, a project that the author of this post created, so this has happened before and they definitely have the skills to bootstrap a new project.
- People like you are insane

Just mass-report the Discord server I guess.

Well, we live in a democracy: 9 out of 10 people enjoy bullying or don't care about it. If you hate democracy, go to North Korea, snowflake!
(obvious /s is obvious)
In other non-news: Using a software doesn't require visiting a loosely associated unofficial community. This has strong vibes of people wanting to be Christian and changing Christianity while being opposed to ~half the bible's content if they bothered to read it. Just fuck that cesspool and move on with your life ...
- It is not obvious. Look at the comments, there are weird people here too.

Who gives a fucking shit lol. Guy makes software I like, I use it. I don't care if he has slaves on treadmill generating his electricity.
- Offensive, but funny

I struggle to be interested in any bling project written by C++ "coders" since they were 9 who don't even know how copyright works so use a pseudonym there instead - they're almost always inexperienced children. And children are almost always sociopaths.
- Is Hyprland violating someone's copyright?

124 comments